Rug shopping has to be one of the most tedious and unpleasant experiences on the planet, and I must say that the rug sellers of American should invest some time in fixing that. Now, I love rugs, and I definitely love shopping, but standing in front of a towering display of heavy carpet pieces strung up to creaky metal poles and flipping through these giant woolen mammoths day in and day out only to find that every single one is not going to work under the kitchen table in my house...

It's just exhausting, and that's all there is to it.

On the bright side, my mother and I are not afraid to use this as an excuse to treat ourselves to shoe shopping and ice cream cones along the way. That way, the day is guaranteed not to be a total loss, and we get the motivation to continue trudging along through five more stores and to deal with three hundred more disappointments.

In the end, I am gaining a newfound respect for interior decorators, who either have a better system for finding rugs or who have witty counterparts tagging along with them who make brilliant conversation such as this:

Mom: "So do you need help getting that plastic tag off of your flip-flop?"
Me: "Pfft. I am Wonder Woman. Watch as I use my super strength to rip this off by hand."
Mom: "Are you sure? I have little scissors in my purse, you know."
Me: "I got it, I got it. Eeps, though Wonder Woman certainly doesn't leave little clear stickers on the bottom of her shoe."
Mom: "Definitely not. She has a 'W' on the bottom of her shoe."
Me: "Oh goody, there's a sticker on the other shoe, too."
Mom: "Well she has a . . . uhh . . . Wow, I guess she has a 'W' on the bottom of that shoe, too, huh?"

"Oh, Mom, we also have to get the street sign off the wall somehow."

"Whoa, that's pretty neat. Where'd you get that?"

"Uhh . . . well . . . from the street."

"Rachel!!"

"Sorry?"

". . . So how do you get one of those things off?"

Three years ago, as a senior in high school, I was approached at Caribou Coffee by a photographer from the Northwest Herald, one of the major papers in my area. She wanted to snap pictures of the group I was with for an article that had already been written about high school students hanging out in coffee joints. The story ended up being on the front page, and the picture took up every inch of space above the fold. (I guess the rest of the world was uneventful that day.)

Two years ago, during my freshman year of college, I fell out of my lofted bed in my dorm room, landing on my desk chair. Sleepily, I directed my browser to my Gmail account. What I saw there was an email from an MTV associate. I blinked several times, trying to focus my eyes. The email was still there. She had read my (really horrible) blog entry about my high school class and our senior prank, somehow deeming the prank interesting enough to be filmed for an episode of MTV's High School Stories. It took me a full month to get over the fact that something I had written in my own small little corner of the internet was sparking the interest of MTV and earning my friends the chance to be on television.

Tonight, I loaded my Flickr page to check for updates from any of my contacts. Instead, I found a message in my inbox from a woman at NowPublic.com, a news site powered by the masses, apparently. She wanted to use my pictures of my cockroach roommates in this article. Apparently, The Houston Museum of Natural Science is offering a whopping twenty-five cents to anyone who donates a live cockroach!

The point here is that, while it's rather exciting to randomly pick up attention from complete strangers without even bothering to publicize myself or my writing or my photos, I'm getting really worried that my fifteen minutes of fame will run out before I get a chance to meet Elijah Wood.